The Mesolithic, or middle stone age, is a period of time that has often been debated.The term Mesolithic developed as a catch-all to refer to material that did not fit into the other categories of prehistory! Specifically the Paleolithic, whichprecedes it, and the Neolithic, which follows it. The term itself is somewhat arbitrary, as there is often overlap between Paleolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic. It is important to note, however, that the end of the Mesolithic corresponds with the beginning of agriculture. Obviously not every hiuman being in the world began to grow crops and domesticate animals at the same time, so we often find the Mesolithic extending for longer periods of time in different parts of the world. The time period of the Mesolithic is from roughly 10,000-5,000bce, but again, because of the differences in technology from one group of people to another, these dates are estimates only.
The Neolithic period represents a huge move forward in human technology. Humans were settling themselves down into agrarian societies, which left them enough spare time to explore some key concepts of civilization - namely, religion, measurement, the rudiments of architecture, writing, and art. Human beings (homo sapiens) had survived the Pleistocene, or Ice Age as it is commonly referred. The glaciers had retreated to their (basically) current positions. Much of the megafauna (giant mammals) of the previous period, many of them painted on cave walls by Paleolithic people, had died out. The climate had become stable, which allowed for reliably timed seasons, and the ability to plant crops.This newly-found climatic stability (however relative it may seem to us in the present) was the one factor that allowed many tribes to abandon their wandering ways and begin to construct more-or-less permanent villages. No longer dependent, since the end of the Mesolithic era, on herd migration for food supplies, peoples of the Neolithic were becoming adept at refining farming techniques and building up domesticated herds of their own ani mals. With an ever-increasing, steady supply of grain and meat, we humans now had time to ponder the Big Picture and invent some rather radical technological advances. What kinds of art were created during this time? The "new" arts to emerge from this era were weaving, architecture, the construction of megaliths and increasingly stylized pictographs that were well on their way to becoming writing. The earlier arts of statuary, painting and pottery stuck with (and still remain with) us. The Neolithic era saw many refinements to each. Statuary (primarily statuettes), made a big comeback after having been largely absent during the Mesolithic age. Its Neolithic theme dwelt primarily on the female/fertility, or "Mother Goddess" imagery (quite in keeping with agriculture, this). There were still animal statuettes, however these weren't lavished with the detail the goddesses enjoyed. They are often found broken into bits - perhaps indicating that they were used symbolically in hunting rituals. Additionally, sculpture was no longer created strictly by carving something. In the Near East, in particular, figurines were now fashioned out of clay and baked. Archaeological digs at Jericho turned up a marvelous human skull (c. 7,000 BC) overlaid with delicate, sculpted plaster features. Painting, in Western Europe and the Near East, left the caves and cliffs for good, and became a purely decorative element. The finds of Çatal Hüyük, an ancient village in modern Turkey, show lovely wall paintings (including the world's earliest known landscape), dating from c. 6150 BC. As for pottery, it began replacing stone and wood utensils at a rapid pace, and also become more highly decorated. What are the key characteristics of Neolithic art? • It was still, almost without exception, created for some functional purpose. • There were more images of humans than animals, and the humans looked more, well, human. • It began to be used for ornamentation. • In the cases of architecture and megalithic constructions, art was now created in fixed locations. This was significant. Where temples, sanctuaries and stone rings were built, gods and goddesses were provided with known destinations. Additionally, the emergence of tombs provided unmoving, "visit-able" resting places for the dearly departed - another first. Side note: At this point, Dear Reader, "art history" typically begins to follow a prescribed course: Iron and bronze are discovered. Ancient civilizations in Mesopotamia and Egypt arise, make art, and are followed by art in the classical civilizations of Greece and Rome. After this, we hang out in Europe for the next thousand years, eventually moving on to the New World, which subsequently shares artistic honors with Europe. This route is commonly known as "Western Art", and is often the focus of any art history/art appreciation syllabus. It is both acceptable (if not ideal) and the route we will take here - for the time being. However, the sort of art that has been described in this article as "Neolithic" (i.e.: Stone age; that of pre-literate peoples who hadn't yet discovered how to smelt metals) continued to flourish in the Americas, Africa, Australia and, in particular, Oceania. In some instances, it was still thriving in the previous (20th) century.
Gobekli Tepe: The World’s First Temple?Predating Stonehenge by 6,000 years, Turkey's stunning Gobekli Tepe upends the conventional view of the rise of civilization
Gobekli Tepe
Gobekli Tepe
By Andrew Curry
Photographs by Berthold Steinhilber
Smithsonian magazine, November 2008
Six miles from Urfa, an ancient city in southeastern Turkey, Klaus Schmidt has made one of the most startling archaeological discoveries of our time: massive carved stones about 11,000 years old, crafted and arranged by prehistoric people who had not yet developed metal tools or even pottery. The megaliths predate Stonehenge by some 6,000 years. The place is called Gobekli Tepe, and Schmidt, a German archaeologist who has been working here more than a decade, is convinced it's the site of the world's oldest temple.
CATALHOYUK, TURKEY — A pair of space-age shelters rising from the beet and barley fields of the flat Konya Plain are the first clue to the Catalhoyuk Research Project, where archaeologists are excavating a 9,000-year-old Neolithic village.
The experts, armed with scalpels, gingerly scraped away micro-layers of white plaster from a wall deep in the dig last month to reveal what the project director, the British archaeologist Ian Hodder, called a “very exciting” and “particularly intriguing” painting with deep reds and reddish oranges thought to be made with red ochre and cinnabar. Read more................. Catal Huyuk Art
A Natural Oasis The site of Jericho, just north of the Dead Sea and due west of the Jordan River, is one of the oldest continuously lived-in cities in the world. The reason for this may be found in its Arabic name, Ārīḥā, which means fragrant; Jericho is a natural oasis in the desert where countless fresh water springs can be found. It was no doubt this resource which drew its first visitors, between 10,000 and 9000 BCE, whose ancestors live there still today.
Biblical Reference The site of Jericho is best known for its identity in the Bible and this has drawn pilgrims and explorers to it as early as the 4th century CE; serious archaeological exploration didn’t begin until the latter half of the 19th century. What continues to draw archaeologists to Jericho today is the hope of finding some evidence of the warrior Joshua, who lead the Israelites to an unlikely victory against the Canaanites ("the walls of the city fell when Joshua and his men marched around them blowing horns" Joshua 6:1-27). Although unequivocal evidence ofJoshua himself has yet to be found, what has been uncovered are some 12,000 years of human activity. The most spectacular finds at Jericho, however, do not date to the time of Joshua, roughly the Bronze Age (3300-1200 BCE), but rather to the earliest part of the Neolithic era, before even the technology to make pottery had been discovered.
Neolithic Art
The Mesolithic, or middle stone age, is a period of time that has often been debated.The term Mesolithic developed as a catch-all to refer to material that did not fit into the other categories of prehistory! Specifically the Paleolithic, whichprecedes it, and the Neolithic, which follows it. The term itself is somewhat arbitrary, as there is often overlap between Paleolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic. It is important to note, however, that the end of the Mesolithic corresponds with the beginning of agriculture. Obviously not every hiuman being in the world began to grow crops and domesticate animals at the same time, so we often find the Mesolithic extending for longer periods of time in different parts of the world. The time period of the Mesolithic is from roughly 10,000-5,000bce, but again, because of the differences in technology from one group of people to another, these dates are estimates only.
The Neolithic period represents a huge move forward in human technology. Humans were settling themselves down into agrarian societies, which left them enough spare time to explore some key concepts of civilization - namely, religion, measurement, the rudiments of architecture, writing, and art.
Human beings (homo sapiens) had survived the Pleistocene, or Ice Age as it is commonly referred. The glaciers had retreated to their (basically) current positions. Much of the megafauna (giant mammals) of the previous period, many of them painted on cave walls by Paleolithic people, had died out. The climate had become stable, which allowed for reliably timed seasons, and the ability to plant crops.This newly-found climatic stability (however relative it may seem to us in the present) was the one factor that allowed many tribes to abandon their wandering ways and begin to construct more-or-less permanent villages. No longer dependent, since the end of the Mesolithic era, on herd migration for food supplies, peoples of the Neolithic were becoming adept at refining farming techniques and building up domesticated herds of their own ani mals. With an ever-increasing, steady supply of grain and meat, we humans now had time to ponder the Big Picture and invent some rather radical technological advances.
What kinds of art were created during this time?
The "new" arts to emerge from this era were weaving, architecture, the construction of megaliths and increasingly stylized pictographs that were well on their way to becoming writing.
The earlier arts of statuary, painting and pottery stuck with (and still remain with) us. The Neolithic era saw many refinements to each.
Statuary (primarily statuettes), made a big comeback after having been largely absent during the Mesolithic age. Its Neolithic theme dwelt primarily on the female/fertility, or "Mother Goddess" imagery (quite in keeping with agriculture, this). There were still animal statuettes, however these weren't lavished with the detail the goddesses enjoyed. They are often found broken into bits - perhaps indicating that they were used symbolically in hunting rituals.
Additionally, sculpture was no longer created strictly by carving something. In the Near East, in particular, figurines were now fashioned out of clay and baked. Archaeological digs at Jericho turned up a marvelous human skull (c. 7,000 BC) overlaid with delicate, sculpted plaster features.
Painting, in Western Europe and the Near East, left the caves and cliffs for good, and became a purely decorative element. The finds of Çatal Hüyük, an ancient village in modern Turkey, show lovely wall paintings (including the world's earliest known landscape), dating from c. 6150 BC.
As for pottery, it began replacing stone and wood utensils at a rapid pace, and also become more highly decorated.
What are the key characteristics of Neolithic art?
• It was still, almost without exception, created for some functional purpose.
• There were more images of humans than animals, and the humans looked more, well, human.
• It began to be used for ornamentation.
• In the cases of architecture and megalithic constructions, art was now created in fixed locations. This was significant. Where temples, sanctuaries and stone rings were built, gods and goddesses were provided with known destinations. Additionally, the emergence of tombs provided unmoving, "visit-able" resting places for the dearly departed - another first.
Side note: At this point, Dear Reader, "art history" typically begins to follow a prescribed course: Iron and bronze are discovered. Ancient civilizations in Mesopotamia and Egypt arise, make art, and are followed by art in the classical civilizations of Greece and Rome. After this, we hang out in Europe for the next thousand years, eventually moving on to the New World, which subsequently shares artistic honors with Europe. This route is commonly known as "Western Art", and is often the focus of any art history/art appreciation syllabus. It is both acceptable (if not ideal) and the route we will take here - for the time being.
However, the sort of art that has been described in this article as "Neolithic" (i.e.: Stone age; that of pre-literate peoples who hadn't yet discovered how to smelt metals) continued to flourish in the Americas, Africa, Australia and, in particular, Oceania. In some instances, it was still thriving in the previous (20th) century.
Gobekli Tepe: The World’s First Temple?Predating Stonehenge by 6,000 years, Turkey's stunning Gobekli Tepe upends the conventional view of the rise of civilization
Six miles from Urfa, an ancient city in southeastern Turkey, Klaus Schmidt has made one of the most startling archaeological discoveries of our time: massive carved stones about 11,000 years old, crafted and arranged by prehistoric people who had not yet developed metal tools or even pottery. The megaliths predate Stonehenge by some 6,000 years. The place is called Gobekli Tepe, and Schmidt, a German archaeologist who has been working here more than a decade, is convinced it's the site of the world's oldest temple.
Read more:http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/gobekli-tepe.html#ixzz1hs1iPibu
Into the Stone Age With a Scalpel: A Dig With Clues on Early Urban Life
By SUSANNE FOWLER
Published: September 7, 2011
CATALHOYUK, TURKEY — A pair of space-age shelters rising from the beet and barley fields of the flat Konya Plain are the first clue to the Catalhoyuk Research Project, where archaeologists are excavating a 9,000-year-old Neolithic village.
Slide Show
The experts, armed with scalpels, gingerly scraped away micro-layers of white plaster from a wall deep in the dig last month to reveal what the project director, the British archaeologist Ian Hodder, called a “very exciting” and “particularly intriguing” painting with deep reds and reddish oranges thought to be made with red ochre and cinnabar.
Read more.................
Catal Huyuk Art
Further reading about Catal Huyuk
Statues of Ain Ghazal
Jericho Share this article
Jericho, Tell es-Sultan archaeological site
A Natural Oasis
The site of Jericho, just north of the Dead Sea and due west of the Jordan River, is
one of the oldest continuously lived-in cities in the world. The reason for this may
be found in its Arabic name, Ārīḥā, which means fragrant; Jericho is a natural oasis
in the desert where countless fresh water springs can be found. It was no doubt
this resource which drew its first visitors, between 10,000 and 9000 BCE, whose
ancestors live there still today.
Biblical Reference
The site of Jericho is best known for its identity in the Bible and this has drawn
pilgrims and explorers to it as early as the 4th century CE; serious archaeological
exploration didn’t begin until the latter half of the 19th century. What continues to
draw archaeologists to Jericho today is the hope of finding some evidence of the
warrior Joshua, who lead the Israelites to an unlikely victory against the Canaanites
("the walls of the city fell when Joshua and his men marched around them blowing
horns" Joshua 6:1-27). Although unequivocal evidence ofJoshua himself has yet to
be found, what has been uncovered are some 12,000 years of human activity.
The most spectacular finds at Jericho, however, do not date to the time of Joshua,
roughly the Bronze Age (3300-1200 BCE), but rather to the earliest part of the
Neolithic era, before even the technology to make pottery had been discovered.
Read more......
http://video.pbs.org/video/1636852466/
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/iceman-murder-mystery.html